If you stand on a Finger Lakes hillside in late November, you’ll see the vineyards in their most honest state. The fruit is long gone, the leaves have fallen, and what remains are rows of twisting grapevines—dark, gnarled, and exposed. They run like quiet lines across the slope, almost like a page waiting for the next sentence to be written. There is nothing showy left to them now, nothing to distract from their bare, architectural form. Some might call them barren. I’m beginning to see them as brave.

There is a peculiar kind of beauty in this stripped-back season. The vines no longer try to impress. They simply stand as they are—unadorned, emptied, and waiting for what they cannot see. The winemakers will tell you that winter is not wasted time. Beneath the hard ground, roots thicken and deepen. Sugars draw inward. The vine gathers what it will need for the year ahead. There is hidden work happening, slow and silent and essential.

I wonder how many of us move through a similar season of the heart. Ad time after the fruiting but before the next green. A time when familiar leaves have fallen and we are left with our own bare shape in the world.

We don’t always choose these seasons; they simply arrive—after loss, after change, after a long stretch of giving ourselves away. When they do, we often feel as vulnerable as those November vines. Exposed. Uncertain. Wondering when color will return to our lives. Wondering if we are still capable of bearing fruit at all.

But the vineyards are quietly teaching another story. They tell us that there is a sacredness to being pared down. That the heart, too, has its winter work—unseen, uncelebrated, yet profoundly formative. Strength is gathered where we cannot measure it. Wisdom is being distilled. Roots are reaching toward depths we have not traveled before.

Jesus once said, “Abide in me… and you will bear much fruit” (John 15). It is easy to hear those words in spring, when everything feels possible. It is harder to trust them in November, when all we see are empty vines and dormant fields. Yet abiding is exactly what winter knows how to do. It stays. It holds fast. It lets the deeper work happen out of sight. Perhaps this is the hidden grace of the between-time: that we are being quietly readied for what comes next.

So if you find yourself in a stripped-back season, take heart. You are not barren. You are becoming. Let the quiet hills remind you that rest is not the opposite of growth. Waiting is not wasted. Winter is not a failure of the vineyard. It is part of its faithfulness. And when the greening comes—as it surely will—you may discover that something strong and steady has been forming in you all along, in the patient dark beneath the surface.